TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Daniel Pauly: Fishing for a Perfect Ocean Editor's Note: In mid-May, Scientific American will announce the winners of this year's Scientific American 10. Every Monday, starting April 13, we will profile a previous Scientific American 50 winner. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Arizona: Camps Canceled by Flu Fears The Muscular Dystrophy Association, based in Tucson, said it was canceling the remainder of its summer camps because swine flu had been reported in them. nytimes.com |
Solar power-purchase agreements, aka let someone else deal with the paperwork for you Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels and taking other steps to save energy in 60-Second Solar. Read his introduction here and see all posts here.At the rate things are going, the sun is going to become a red giant and engulf the inner planets before we ever get our solar panels. It took us months to navigate the government and utility bureaucracies, we’re now waiting for the installers to work through their backlog, and we're worried about the installation glitches that other solar bloggers have reported. What I wouldn’t have given for a power-purchase agreement (PPA), whereby an outside company navigates the bureaucracy and installs the panels for you, in return for collecting a share of the public subsidies. [More] rss.sciam.com |
State Avoids Shutting More Than a Third of Its Parks In the face of a sustained outcry, the Schwarzenegger administration backpedaled on the way it would cut the state parks budget. nytimes.com |
Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense On November 18, with the United Nations Global Warming Conference in Copenhagen fast approaching, U.S. Senator James R. Inhofe (R-Okla.) took the floor of the Senate and proclaimed 2009 to be "The Year of the Skeptic ." Had the senator's speech marked a new commitment to dispassionate, rational inquiry , a respect for scientific thought and a well-grounded doubt in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy, it might have been cause for cheer. But Inhofe had a more narrow definition of skeptic in mind: he meant "standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism."Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course--some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming. [More] rss.sciam.com |